Jet Crashes in China, Killing 141; 5th Serious Accident in 4 Months

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF,

Published: November 25, 1992

BEIJING, Nov. 24—
A Boeing 737 passenger airliner on a flight to a tourist spot in southern China crashed into a mountain today, killing all 141 people aboard, the official New China News Agency reported.

The agency quoted witnesses saying the plane belched smoke before it hit the ground and exploded in China's worst reported air disaster, but there was no immediate report of what went wrong.

The plane was on a 55-minute flight from the southern city of Guangzhou to Guilin, one of China's best-known tourist spots, with rivers and jutting peaks similar to those in traditional Chinese paintings. Hundreds of thousands of visitors each year take daylong cruises down the Li River near Guilin to admire the spectacular limestone crags. 13 Foreigners Aboard

The plane crashed about 15 miles from Guilin, in the Guangxi region. The area is mountainous and sparsely populated.

Among the dead were nine Taiwanese, two Spaniards and one person each from Macao and Canada. The rest of the 133 passengers and 8 crew members were Chinese.

The crash was the fifth in China in four months, and it seems likely to intensify questions about the consequences for safety of the breakup of China's state airline monopoly. The flight was operated by China Southern Airlines, one of a growing number of regional carriers established in the last five years to replace the monopoly, the Civil Air Administration of China.

A. Robert Christensen, a Boeing spokesman in Hong Kong, said the plane, a Boeing 737-300, had been delivered to China Southern in May 1991. As of today, the plane had logged only 4,165 flight hours and 3,153 landings, both very low numbers.

The press agency reported the crash only about six hours after it occurred. In the past, China sometimes waited for days before releasing news about disasters. But, in a broadcast several hours after the agency's report, the national television news did not mention the crash.

Until now, China's worst reported air disaster was a crash in October 1990 that followed an attempted hijacking. The hijacker asked to be flown abroad, but the pilot apparently tried to trick him and land at Guangzhou, once called Canton. There was a struggle in the cockpit and the plane crashed into another plane that was waiting on the tarmac to take off. A total of 128 people died on the two planes.

Of the recent disasters, the worst was on July 31, when 107 people died when a Russian-built passenger jet crashed shortly after taking off from Nanjing. That plane was also operated by one of the small airlines that are proliferating with China's increasingly market-oriented economy.

Aviation experts say that China's pilots are relatively skilled, but that maintenance is often indifferent and air-traffic control systems strained.